Dalton Caldwell

> you haven't seen it, you were not interested in looking and I doubt that any "evangelist" is going to change your mind This is disingenuous. (Also, ENS appears to be functionally similar to App.net [1]. I'm open to being challenged on this.) One thing pervasively lacking from Web3 is compelling fiction. Not "this and that trustlessly," but a functional narrative of someone doing something useful or compelling they presently can't. VR has that. Crypto, not so much. Instead we have pitches of doing the same things one can currently do, but decentralised. (Again, see App.net.) That will be appealing for a certain political niche. But Truth Social for libertarians, while definitely worth something, isn't the narrative web3 wants. [1] http://daltoncaldwell.com/we-did-it

But what is actually being paid for? Who is ultimately paying "our" salaries? Why? “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.” ~ Jeff Hammerbacher, fmr. Manager of Facebook Data Team, founder of Cloudera. http://daltoncaldwell.com/an-audacious-proposal "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" ~ Upton Sinclair

One day startups will learn to stop building on negative/zero/low revenue social networks. After hearing about Zynga getting diversified almost out of existence on Facebook, Dalton Caldwell being served with a "Join us or else"[1] from Facebook, and the Twitter 3rd party castration[2]; it amazes Me that people are still trying to build services on top of social platforms. These platforms are generating very little revenue relative to their valuations. If you have this amazing service that starts making money or getting notoriety, it's in the social networks best interest to stop your business and build the feature themselves. [1] - http://daltoncaldwell.com/dear-mark-zuckerberg [2] - https://blog.twitter.com/2012/changes-coming-to-twitter-api

For some reason I get him and Dalton Caldwell mixed up. Its not the same person is it? http://daltoncaldwell.com/ They are both from SF far as I can tell.

I have been waiting because I have been afraid. I have been blogging extensively about platform-risk issues for the past month, but have never come out and said this part: http://daltoncaldwell.com/

>imho everything worth doing looks stupid and insignificant at first: http://daltoncaldwell.com/the-makings-of-history-are-banal Those aren't particularly good choices...because I doubt those announcements were considered banal by the authors or by their intended audience. Particularly the announcement of the Web, which you quote in part as: "However, it could start a revolution in information access" A better example would be the origins of something like Facebook, which sounds like it was geared towards scoping out the attractiveness of Harvard classmates and has grown into something far more ubiquitous and all-encompassing. In comparison, the Web hasn't really outpaced its initial predicted scope -- a "revolution in information access" -- but of course, its makers dreamed big.

I think Dalton Caldwell laid out an interesting vision of the "Twitter as protocol" argument: http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have-been

I think WhatsApp is where Twitter was during their Ascend-to-protocol Vs Just-push-Ads phase[1], only that WA is dead-set on not going down the Ad route. IMO their options are whether to become an app platform for businesses(Service delivery, payments, shopping) or to become a user-data source for FB. KIM that they are naturally competing with IG & FB.com in generating revenue for FB Inc and subscription isn't working for them(mostly because of almost zero app-buying & digital payments culture in places where WA is popular). [1] http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have-been

Maybe it was too early back then to see the value in it, but does anyone remember App.net? Dalton Caldwell (now working at YCombinator) had a plan to build a backbone for developers to build on top off without fear of APIs being taken away from them[0]. The idea came about from this exact topic (Twitter becoming more and more hostile to developers)[1]. [0]http://daltoncaldwell.com/an-audacious-proposal [1]http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have-been

It all reminds me of this post: http://daltoncaldwell.com/dear-mark-zuckerberg Facebook is trying to make the platform too good for startups to resist building on. By the time something built on the platform emerges as a success, Facebook can either heavy-hand them into an acquisition, or lock them out and take away their momentum.

Dalton is a part time partner at YC : http://daltoncaldwell.com/y-combinator

Tobi Lütke of Spotify - http://tobi.lutke.com/ Dalton Caldwell of App.net - http://daltoncaldwell.com/ Suhail Doshi of Mixpanel - http://sufficientlyadvanced.net/ Jack Groetzinger of SeatGeek - http://jackg.org/ Eric Koester of Zaarly - http://ekoester.com/

By the way, this blog might help explain: http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have-been

Someone's already done that, all you have to do is use it (maybe as well as twitter if you want): https://app.net/ https://tent.io/ Here's why you shouldn't depend on Twitter or other closed platforms long term: http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have-been

Just read this: "Understanding Like-gate" http://daltoncaldwell.com/understanding-likegate

I remember reading this or something alarmingly similar (that too was about Oh, The Places You’ll Go!) a while back on HN... But this one was published today! What the hell is going on? Is it deja vu or it's just a happy coincidence?!! Edit: Good... "Oh, The Places You'll Go! site:news.ycombinator.com" Google search helped me assure myself I'm not crazy. This is the other article: http://daltoncaldwell.com/oh-the-places-youll-go and HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4061059 Funny thing is that both are using Svbtle, which helped further confuse me. I won't remove this comment (which is definitely off-topic and non-constructive) because I think others might experience the same shock as mine and it would save them a bit of Googling...

They have committed to supporting open standards like Activity Streams, PubSubHubBub, and Webfinger. While not OStatus explicitly, it looks like the majority of OStatus will be supported. http://daltoncaldwell.com/a-response-to-brennan-novak

Dalton did back standards http://daltoncaldwell.com/a-response-to-brennan-novak

It's rather unclear what Dalton means here. The interpretation that seems likeliest to me is that Dalton can easily provide independent evidence to a professional auditor (i.e., someone who can be given trusted access to sensitive data, and someone who isn't easily induced to lie on a client's behalf) that the tally is correct. Unless it becomes routine to actually employ these auditors, that doesn't really answer jtokoph's worry. Postscript - Indeed, that's what he meant: on http://daltoncaldwell.com/we-did-it he says "In the very near future I will ask an impartial 3rd party take a look at our data (while preserving all privacy of our backers) and publicly verify that the join.app.net was operated in an honest manner."

An update from Dalton that deals with new features and third party verification of the funding - http://daltoncaldwell.com/we-did-it

We are using Stripe to host/power the billing aspects of join.app.net. In the very near future I will ask an impartial 3rd party take a look at our data (while preserving all privacy of our backers) and publicly verify that the join.app.net was operated in an honest manner. http://daltoncaldwell.com/we-did-it

Read Dalton's response http://daltoncaldwell.com/a-response-to-brennan-novak the only thing missing is the free user invites and open source codebase, however someone has already made an iOS app to the platform https://github.com/sneakyness/AppApp

He's relatively plugged into the SV tech scene. He also struck a cord with his original blog post[1]. App.net was obviously just a reaction to the outpouring of support for the ideas he expressed in that post. This could just be proof that 80,000+ page views of a blog post does not equal $500K in paid users at $50, $100, or $1,000 a pop. More recently he received a ton of attention from his open letter to Zuck[2]. [1]http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have-been [2]http://daltoncaldwell.com/dear-mark-zuckerberg

You are on the right track. Couple points to round it off: 1. Dalton is questioning the dominant business model online & fired his first salvo via join.app.net. 2. As a vocal spokesman for a pro-user & pro-developer platform design, he's got to rally his forces. No wonder he is gunning for the big ones - the first indication was his response to Fred Wilson's post (http://daltoncaldwell.com/fred-wilson-is-wrong-about-free).

Thanks for sharing your thoughts! We strongly believe what you want App.net to be is exactly what twitter could have been (http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have-been). We are definitely thinking a lot about community building.

I am not so sure that is the case. Kevin Kelly wrote about having 1000 true fans. I think his argument works here too. http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/1000_true_fans.php If you think about how Twitter needs to reach 100 of millions if not billions of users to possibly become sustainable, or figure out how to squeeze more money out of the users they have. Then compare that to the App.net proposal. Especially the part about making the user the customer. Then you can see how having a small set of faithful users might be more sustainable. Dalton wrote more about this in his post: http://daltoncaldwell.com/an-audacious-proposal disclaimer: I work for App.net, but this post represents my own views.

I agree, I watched the video and read the FAQ and I'm still not 100% sure what you're building. Edit: I hadn't read your original post at http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have-been. I just read it and now it makes sense. I have a feeling your video will reach a much wider audience, so others might feel lost as well.

I have heard this sentiment echoed by others - several industry insiders included - before. If this is indeed true that the sales and marketing honchos are exclusively running large tracts of key operations, aren't the resulting missteps going to be deleterious to Mark's record as the chief? This sentiment was echoed by Dalton Caldwell about Facebook's "M&A" team, last year: I am not sure if this bubbled up to you, Mark, but after this all happened I directly communicated my feedback regarding just how unhappy I was with this situation to one of your executives. The executive apologized and said he would take my feedback under consideration. Mark, I know for a fact that my experience was not an isolated incident. Several other startup founders & Facebook employees have told me that what I experienced was part of a systematic M&A “formula”. Your team doesn’t seem to understand that being “good negotiators” vs implying that you will destroy someone’s business built on your “open platform” are not the same thing. I know all about intimidation-based negotiation tactics: I experienced them for years while dealing with the music industry. Bad-faith negotiations are inexcusable, and I didn’t want to believe your company would stoop this low. My mistake. Does Mark maintain control of all of the operations or has he got petty feudal lords running various units and operations? Source: http://daltoncaldwell.com/dear-mark-zuckerberg Edit: Cleanup